1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image management system for storing and managing image data obtained by the cameras installed at the regular spots of a theme park and other similar facilities.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a printing system has been proposed in which a regular spot camera is installed within an attraction of a theme park and other similar facilities to take photographs of visitors as the subject, and the printout of the image data obtained by photographing is handed over to the visitors. In such a printing system, the printout is handed over to the visitors in each of the attractions, thus they have inconvenience to have to wait until the printout becomes available to them in each of the attractions.
For this reason, photographing systems having a plurality of regular spot cameras have been proposed as described, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 6,628,899, in which wireless tags similar to. the wireless IC card, having ID information recorded thereon for identifying each of the visitors are handed over to the visitors. In the system, the ID information is transmitted from the wireless tag to a communication device installed with the regular spot camera at the time of photographing, which is related to the image data obtained by photographing and stored in an image server with the image data. Thus, the visitor may refer to all his/her photographs taken at a theme park by accessing the image server and searching the image data based on the ID information at a later date, so that the burden of the visitors to have to wait until the printout becomes available to them in each of the attractions may be reduced. Further, in the system described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,628,899, the visitors may also operate the regular spot camera by operating the wireless tag to take their photographs with the face turning to the camera.
If the visitor to a theme park has a digital camera or cellular phone with a built-in camera, the visitor may obtain the image data obtained by the regular spot camera installed in the theme park (hereinafter referred to as “first image data”) and those obtained by his/her digital camera (herein after referred to as “second image data”). When the first and second image data are obtained in this way, the visitor wants to send the second image data to the image server where the first image data are stored to manage the second image data in the same manner as the first image data.